Former Florida governor and Republican presidential candidate said the majority of illegal immigrants are coming from Central America, not Mexico, and Donald Trump is proposing to build “a wall that can’t be built.”

[...]

“What Donald Trump is proposing is a wall that can’t be built, and if it was, it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars,” said Bush of the Republican front-runner’s plan. Trump has said he “will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I will have Mexico pay for that wall.”

[...]

Trump’s focus on Mexico is inappropriate since the majority of illegal immigrants in the United States are from Central America, not Mexico, Bush said.

“Right now the number of Mexicans crossing the border is basically flat,” he said. “The immigrants that are crossing legally or illegally in both cases are from Central America now. It changes.”

Two points: First, a wall on our southern border would stop both Mexicans and Central Americans (who cut through Mexico) from crossing. Second, the number of Mexicans crossing the border illegally shouldn’t be “flat,” it should be zero.

Sunday, 30 August 2015

Republican legislators have gotten their messaging instructions from their top leaders: Tout unpopular free-trade measures during the August recess, ignore popular curbs on the migration that saps Americans’ wages.

Breitbart News has exclusively obtained an internal August recess messaging instruction set for Republican legislators produced by Sen. John Thune (R-SD), who orchestrates the GOP senators’ PR pitch. This 20-page messaging instruction manual seems to confirm prior reports by Breitbart News that Republican Congressional leadership has no plans to enact popular immigration reforms to curb large-scale migration.

[...]

Each year, the federal government invites roughly 3 million legal migrants and guest-workers to compete for jobs against the 4 million Americans who enter the workforce. They’re being invited into the United States by Obama, with the fervent support of the business interests that fund the Democratic and Republican political machines.

For months, migration has been at the forefront of the nation’s attention: reports documenting the compression of the middle class during the forty-year green card wave, the discovery that all net employment gains among women since the recession went to foreign workers, the unveiling of a nation-wide illegal migrant crime wave, the murder of Kate Steinle and the Senate Judiciary Commitee’s hearing on illegal migrant crime, the “Summer of Trump” whose rise to national prominence has been fueled by a campaign focused on immigration moderation, the Chattanooga shooting carried out by a Kuwaiti immigrant, the rampant use of the H-1B visa to supplant American workers with lower-wage foreigners, the overcrowding of schools where educational resources for black and Hispanic Americans have been significantly siphoned to provide benefits to illegal migrant kids who surged across the border last summer, and the blue-ward shift in the electoral landscape of formerly red states about by the federal government’s green card gusher.

Yet there is not a single mention of migration in Thune’s packet, even though 2014 polling data from the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) showed popular migration reform would boost GOP support. The NRSC is responsible for helping GOP senators win their elections.

Saturday, 29 August 2015

Ramesh Ponnuru makes six points supporting his argument that Donald Trump “is a nuisance, not a nightmare.” I have some quibbles. His first two points:

Because parties don’t pick nominees who have never run for anything before, unless they happened to be the victorious Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in World War II a few years earlier.

Because major parties don’t succumb to sudden hostile takeovers.

There’s a first time for everything. Donald Trump is our first pop culture candidate and the electorate is angry and divided (and dumbed down) like never before.

Next:

Because too many of his supporters are just registering discontent before they make a real decision several months from now -- or have a low likelihood of voting in the primaries at all.

This one’s on the mark. Don’t want to join in a nuanced discussion about Scott Walker’s health care proposal and Bobby Jindal’s objections to it? Say you’re for Trump! No thinking required!

This next one’s a little dicey:

Because Republicans aren’t going to choose a nominee who wants to raise taxes on the rich. (A lot of Republicans may be fine with that idea, but a lot of opponents care deeply about it.)

There are three reasons why Republicans may oppose taxes on the rich: They think it’s immoral, and/or they think it’s bad for the economy and harms everyone, and/or they are rich themselves. Trump has snookered a lot of people on a lot of issues; he may (wrongly) change thinking on the morality and economic impact of higher taxes.

This one’s just wrong:

Because Republican elected officials would consolidate behind a consensus choice if Trump started winning delegates.

So if John Boehner and Mitch McConnell get behind someone, he’s in? Endorsements from GOP officials are doing more harm than good these days.

And a catch-all:

Because the decisive Republican presidential primary voters are a pretty sober-minded bunch.

Friday, 28 August 2015

I’ve said for some time now that illegal immigration and high levels of legal immigration work against the interests of legal immigrants, including Hispanic voters, and that the Hispanic vote is not monolithic. Peggy Noonan confirms:

My friend Cesar works the deli counter at my neighborhood grocery store. He is Dominican, an immigrant, early 50s, and listens most mornings to a local Hispanic radio station, La Mega, on 97.9 FM. Their morning show is the popular “El Vacilón de la Mañana,” and after the first GOP debate, Cesar told me, they opened the lines to call-ins, asking listeners (mostly Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican) for their impressions. More than half called in to say they were for Mr. Trump. Their praise, Cesar told me a few weeks ago, dumbfounded the hosts. I later spoke to one of them, who identified himself as D.J. New Era. He backed Cesar’s story. “We were very surprised,” at the Trump support, he said. Why? “It’s a Latin-based market!”

“He’s the man,” Cesar said of Mr. Trump. This week I went by and Cesar told me that after Mr. Trump threw Univision’s well-known anchor and immigration activist, Jorge Ramos, out of an Iowa news conference on Tuesday evening, the “El Vacilón” hosts again threw open the phone lines the following morning and were again surprised that the majority of callers backed not Mr. Ramos but Mr. Trump. Cesar, who I should probably note sees me, I sense, as a very nice establishment person who needs to get with the new reality, was delighted.

I said: Cesar, you’re supposed to be offended by Trump, he said Mexico is sending over criminals, he has been unfriendly, you’re an immigrant. Cesar shook his head: No, you have it wrong. Immigrants, he said, don’t like illegal immigration, and they’re with Mr. Trump on anchor babies. “They are coming in from other countries to give birth to take advantage of the system. We are saying that! When you come to this country, you pledge loyalty to the country that opened the doors to help you.”

He added, “We don’t bloc vote anymore.” The idea of a “Latin vote” is “disparate,” which he said generally translates as nonsense, but which he means as “bull----.”

He finished, on the subject of Jorge Ramos: “The elite have different notions from the grass-roots working people.”

OK. Old style: Jorge Ramos speaks for Hispanic America. New style: Jorge Ramos speaks for Jorge Ramos. Old style: If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America. New style: How touching that an American president once thought if you lost a newsman you’d lost a country.

It’s too bad for Trump that he led with “they’re rapists” rather than “they’re taking our jobs.” And it’s too bad for all of us that a real conservative candidate didn’t figure this out before Trump. (Via Drudge.)

Thursday, 27 August 2015

That’s what Trump told some “dreamers” just before he said he supported amnesty for them. But that was in 2013, so it doesn’t count, right?

Of course, the “dreamers” aren’t enchanted with him now, because they can’t be any more certain of where he stands than any of the rest of us:

Sanchez, who is 25 and now in law school, cracked up when asked about the ties. He said he was literally wearing one of the three Trump gave him that day.

“Considering what he told us, it’s a complete 360, all he’s doing now is spewing hate,” Sanchez said. “He’s digging himself in a hole even more. He was nice then but now he wants to kick us out of the country.”

That’s what Ronald Reagan was (wrongly) accused of being. But I think it fits someone else much better, and he may be running for president:

Picture the day Vice President Joe Biden wins the Democratic nomination for president in 2016.

Suddenly, the classified information Hillary Clinton stored on a private, insecure e-mail server is just grist for a juicy FBI investigation — not a defining issue in the presidential race. Suddenly, Clinton’s problematic record at the State Department is downgraded to a minor sub-section of the Republican argument against President Obama’s foreign-policy performance as a whole. Suddenly her pledge to Charles Woods, the father of a Navy SEAL killed in Benghazi, that she’d “make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted” is a historical footnote, not a key revelation into the character of the Democratic nominee.

With Biden as the nominee, the Clinton Foundation and its shady, favor-seeking foreign and domestic donors vanish as a campaign issue. So do the thorny questions of quid pro quo impropriety, real or apparent, created by those donors’ favor-seeking while Clinton sat atop the State Department.

Democrats would shift from a candidate with terrible retail politics skills to one who was born to schmooze — although perhaps Biden’s style is a bit “hands-on.” Their standard-bearer would no longer be a woman widely known as a “congenital liar,” but a man whose struggles with message discipline are the stuff of legend — a man seen as too verbally reckless to knowingly lie to people.

They would go from a nominee who has abysmally hostile relations with the press to one who is seen as wacky and entertaining. For reporters, the supreme challenge is getting access to Clinton and, on those rare occasions when she takes their questions, getting her to spout anything other than focus-grouped pabulum. The supreme challenge with Joe Biden is getting him to stop.

The vice presidency is a good platform for a presidential run: No actual responsibilities. As much media visibility as you want. Claim as much credit for you boss’s accomplishments as you’d like, remain silent about his failures as a matter of loyalty.

Wednesday, 26 August 2015

Trump is, in effect, promising to be a right-wing Obama, to run roughshod over the rules to fix things Obama and other politicians have broken.

It’s easy to see why this is seductive.

Conservatives and others who dislike Obama see him acting with impunity. They believe the media cover for him. They think Republicans in Congress are too weak to challenge him. And so he gets whatever he wants.

They’re largely right about the media, but they’re wrong that he gets away with whatever he pleases.

His immigration scheme was basically thrown in a garbage can by a district judge in Texas only three months after his speech, and his appointments to the National Labor Relations Board were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Right-wing Obamaism is just as dangerous. The American system is designed to restrain our politicians, not to give them a free hand.

Trump is uninterested in such niceties, and he is canny enough to declare that anyone who disagrees with him is simply too weak or cowardly or too controlled by “political correctness” to see that his strongman tactics are the only way to fix what’s broken.

But the answer to Obamaism isn’t more Obamaism. The answer to a president who acts like a strongman isn’t another strongman. The answer is to restore the proper balance to the American government.